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Australian optometrist appointed ISCLS president

Optometrist Mr Damon Ezekiel is the first Australian to be crowned president of the International Society of Contact Lens Specialists (ISCLS).

Ezekiel, owner of Ezekiel Eyes in Nedlands, Perth, assumed the presidency at the society’s 46th congress in Washington DC last month.

He was “proud and humbled” to be elected for the role, which coincided with him being awarded the Herschel Medal for voluntary work he’d done in developing countries.

“The ISCLS reflects the best of the best in contact lens practice around the world; these are the men and women who wrote many of the textbooks students now use,” he said.

“The ISCLS reflects the best of the best in contact lens practice around the world; these are the men and women who wrote many of the textbooks students now use.”

Damon Ezekiel, ISCLS

“They are practitioners who have revolutionised the treatment of eye conditions, and their work has improved the quality of life of thousands of patients over many decades.”

Ezekiel, who joined ISCLS 15 years ago, said one of his aims would be to encourage younger members to join the 65-year-old society.

At the congress, he received the Herschel Medal for voluntary work for charity Sight For All in Vietnam in 2014 and Cambodia in 2017, where he fitted scleral contact lenses for babies born with cataracts.

Ezekiel is also a contact lens consultant to research organisations and lectures and conducts workshops in contact lens practice. This includes the fitting of all types of rigid gas permeable contact lenses, such as orthokeratology, scleral lenses and soft bifocal, multi-focal and cosmetic contact lenses.

He is tracing the legacy of his father, Don – a Member of the Order of Australia, contact lens inventor, ISCLS member and now retired Perth optometrist who was awarded the same medal in 2005. Don invented and produced the world’s first gas permeable scleral contact lens.

British optometrist Ms Caroline Hodd was the recipient of a second Herschel Medal at the congress. She is the only woman to ever design and market a contact lens to help people with unusual eye conditions.

The Herschel Medal is named after English astronomer Sir John Herschel, who first proposed the idea of making a mould of a person’s eyes, enabling the production of corrective lenses that could conform to the front surface of the eye.